I like Dr. Sanjay Gupta. He seems like a nice guy to me. Watch this CNN news segment here where he attempts to explain one aspect of the high cost of medical care.
I appreciate his effort to shed some light on the bottom line of health care but just telling me the prices charged for the various
products and services doesn't justify those prices to me. I assume that he was
just reporting the facts as he understands them and that he had no
other motive in this segment but, for me, he just made a compelling case for
both health care reform, insurance reform, and tort reform.
As a family that's
self-employed, the cost of health insurance for a couple like us is
enormous. As a marriage and family counselor in private practice, my wife is also a health
care provider and a large part of her services is paid by the
insurance providers of her clients. Insurance companies tell providers
like my wife what they are going to pay . . . take it or leave it. There's no negotiation involved and it's not a percentage of the
health care provider's fee but simply a rate that the insurance company establishes on its own. Increasing her rates would not impact what the insurance companies pay for her services. One reason that her rates are the lowest in the area and have not increased for many years is that the only people adversely affected by rate increases are those without insurance. Those are the people that pay the full fee and all others pay what their insurance company determines that they will pay. It's her position that the uninsured are probably the people that can least likely absorb a rate increase, although her cost of providing services have continued to increase.
There's something wrong in the health care and insurance industries. The current legislation being negotiated in both houses of Congress may not be the best solution but doing nothing would be even worse, I think.
You probably have some good ideas of what needs to happen.
Let me encourage you to communicate those ideas to your Senators and Representatives so that they can be better informed about what you see as the problem and what you'd like to see as a solution.
I recently wrote a review of Karen Zacharias' new book, Will Jesus Buy Me a Double-Wide? ('Cause I Need More Room For My Plasma TV). I met Karen a few weeks back at Page & Palette, a local bookstore. We talked about her book and about my experience in the bookstore business. She invited me to write a guest post on her blog about how I felt about having had a Christian bookstore that closed after 9 years because it couldn't sustain itself financially. She wanted to know how that stacked-up against the prosperity gospel that she address in her book and if I felt betrayed by God? 
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